Cooperative Security for Network Coding File Distribution

Abstract

Peer-to-peer content distribution networks can suffer from malicious participants that corrupt content. Current systems verify blocks with traditional cryptographic signatures and hashes. However, these techniques do not apply well to more elegant schemes that use network coding techniques for efficient content distribution.Architectures that use network coding are prone to jamming attacks where the introduction of a few corrupted blocks can quickly result in a large number of bad blocks propagating through the system. Identifying such bogus blocks is difficult and requires the use of homomorphic hashing functions, which are computationally expensive. This paper presents a practical security scheme for network coding that reduces the cost of verifying blocks on-the-fly while efficiently preventing the propagation of malicious blocks. In our scheme, users not only cooperate to distribute the content, but (well-behaved) users also cooperate to protect themselves against malicious users by informing affected nodes when a malicious block is found. We analyze and study such cooperative security scheme and introduce elegant techniques to prevent DoS attacks. We show that the loss in the efficiency caused by the attackers is limited to the effort the attackers put to corrupt the communication, which is a natural lower bound in the damage of the system. We also show experimentally that checking as low as 1-5% of the received blocks is enough to guarantee low corruption rates.

An update model for network coding in cloud storage systems

“…The fundamental insight of network coding is that information to be transmitted from the source in a session can be inferred, or decoded, by the intended receivers, and does not have to be transmitted verbatim. The benefits for coding at intermediate nodes include high throughput [1], [3], efficient routing algorithm design [17], energy savings in wireless networking [18], and security [19]. Network coding may be performed over a large finite field, as in ReedSolomon codes, or over a binary field, as in fountain codes [20], [21].…”

Secure network coding for wireless mesh networks: Threats, challenges, and directions

“…Existing schemes use specialized homomorphic hash functions or homomorphic digital signatures. In hash-based schemes [36,21], the source uses a homomorphic hash function to compute a hash of each native data packet and sends these hashes to intermediate nodes via an authenticated channel. The homomorphic property of the hash function allows nodes to compute the hash of a coded packet out of the hashes of native packets.…”

Practical Random Linear Network Coding on GPUs

“…Hence it is possible to use normal hash functions, such as SHA1, to verify the correctness of a data block by comparing the hash of each received data block to the corresponding hash provided by the source. With network coding, the effect of pollution attack becomes more serious and harder to detect [14] [15] [16] for two reasons: First, each bogus block can be encoded with regular data blocks before being propagated in the network. Second, the traditional hash functions, e.g., SHA1, are no longer practical since the encoded blocks received by each peer can-not be predetermined by the source.…”

“…To defend against such attacks, homomorphic hash functions (HHFs) have been proposed to provide a mechanism for verifying the integrity of the encoded data blocks received from the network. In a nutshell, HHFs offer a nice property that the hash value of any encoded data block can be derived from the hash values of the original data blocks, based on which we can identify the bad encoded data blocks without decoding them [14] [15]. Hence, it can effectively prevent the propagation of the bogus data blocks.…”